IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek)

Posted Apr 6, 2010 23:56 UTC (Tue) by vblum (guest, #1151)
In reply to: IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek) by coriordan
Parent article: IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek)

Hm, but this is not a lawsuit brought by IBM just yet.

In fact it seems that IBM was hit with an antitrust complaint because they did not wish to license their software to someone who wasn't buying their hardware.

So before accusing IBM of suing anyone, I would wait for them to actually sue, based on patents. So far, they have not sued any free software project based on patents.

What they've done is, they have threatened a commercial operation, by waving some of their patents around. That operation is trying to make money by replacing one piece of IBM's business here (hardware) with their own solution, while getting to use IBM's software for the purpose. In fact, that operation did fire the first shot (antitrust), which isn't exactly nice, either.

I fail to see why IBM should be forced to sell their own software under terms set by someone else. As has been pointed out before, similar arguments could be made to un-GPL GPL'ed software (mysql).

If IBM _does_ attempt to shut down a free software project based on patents, one can still revisit that particular issue then. But, not yet.

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IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek)

Posted Apr 7, 2010 0:47 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for pointing out the big mistake (that IBM didn't sue). I've updated the section
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IBM#TurboHercules.2C_2010

I've limited myself to the swpat aspects. For IBM, it might be part of a bigger commercial picture, but for en.swpat.org, I'm just documenting what they do regarding swpats.

IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek)

Posted Apr 7, 2010 8:08 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

Yes, fair enough. I don't like the patents aspect either.